Customizing the sidebar

Material for nbdev makes it easy to customize the navigation in your project. You can modify the menu items by adding, deleting, or renaming them.

Renaming menu items

You can change the names of the API, CLI, and Releases menu items by editing the mkdocs/summary_template.txt file. This file is used to define the structure of your project’s documentation.

Now, lets change navigation structure of our nbdev_mkdocs_tutorial project. We are going to rename the API menu to Reference in the sidebar. Please run the following command from the root directory of your project to open the file:

vi mkdocs/summary_template.txt

and replace the below line from - API to - Reference.

After making the change, the file will look like this:

{sidebar}
- Reference
{api}
- CLI
{cli}
- [Releases]{changelog}

Save the file, stop the server and re-run the nbdev_mkdocs preview command to preview your changes.

Now, the documentation should look like this:

Removing menu items

You can also remove items from the side navigation in your project documentation. For example, let’s say you want to remove the CLI menu. You can do this by modifying the same file.

Please run the following command from the root directory of your project to open the file:

vi mkdocs/summary_template.txt

and delete the below lines

- CLI
{cli}

After making the change, the file will look like this:

{sidebar}
- Reference
{api}
- [Releases]{changelog}

Save the file, stop the server and re-run the nbdev_mkdocs preview command to preview your changes.

Now, the documentation should look like this: